Lauren: Thank you for joining! So, I think to start with our conversation I’d just love it if you could spend a minute talking about your role at SAP?

Scott: Sure, so at SAP I’m part of our product organization, our product management for CRM. So I head up North America for product management, so I’m basically the customer-facing, or field-facing of our organization, our product management organization. I look at it as I’m the guy in the middle between reality and development, our developers develop really cool software, innovative, and I get to send that and evangelize that to our customers and our field and our partners, and at the same time I get to hear the reality from our customers in the field and partners and feed that back to our development organization.

Lauren: That’s great, that’s a pretty fun spot, sounds like.

Scott: It’s real fun.

Lauren: Ok, so you’ve been familiar with our CRM events for some years – been presenting at quite a few events over the years. This event you have two sessions, one was Jumpstart Day, can you talk a little bit about that, I believe you gave an overview of the product portfolio, can you kind of maybe give a—I know a jumpstart session is three hours long, we only have a few minutes here, so if you could just maybe give a snapshot of the high points of your session?

Scott: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll try to summarize the three hours. So one of the big things is, in the session, we covered CRM kind of from A to Z, from the beginning, but one of the big things we talked about of how we’re moving as an organization from CRM more to customer engagement solutions. So that’s one of the big things you’ll hear, is customer engagement solutions by SAP, because it’s much more about engaging with customers, than CRM and traditional CRM is just the table stakes; the sales, service, and marketing. We have to figure out a way now, how do we help customers engage with their customer, and their customer’s customer.

So it was a great session, we covered everything from our portfolio around our sales tools, particularly around some of our new capabilities around cloud for sales, providing cloud technology for our customers to get up and running quicker, be more agile, by taking advantage of all their investments they have with our on-premise solution, and on the marketing side, same thing. You know, technology where now it’s not just about transactional, how do I generate leads, how do I track my conversion rates and my costs, but how do I do more of the creative side of marketing as well? So how do I protect my brand, my images, understand what’s going on in social media and react, not just analyze but take the insight into action.

And then service is kind of interesting too, because it’s, you know, I’ve been doing service for more years than I’d like to say, but you know, everything from call center to you know, where we’re able to take phone calls, email, and chat, things like that. But now the new wave is how do I keep up with social media, you know, cause people are out there on Facebook and Twitter, community forums, and in those different channels we got to keep up with it. Cause if not, you know, a brand could be tarnished by anyone nowadays cause one little comment can spread to millions and millions of people, so social media’s really critical in the service area. So we focused on that, and how we could also extend service organizations their on-premise through the cloud as well. So we focused a lot about on-premise and things we’ve done to enhance the solution, with HANA and our analytics, predictive analytics, but on top of it, we’re now taking that and making it agile, where we can have products, new innovations out every few months with the cloud, and the customers don’t have to do major upgrades to get the new innovation, so really exciting, really exciting session that we had.

Lauren: Great, so you’re talking about on-premise versus cloud, which is something that I feel like people have been talking about for a few years now. You obviously have a lot of—as this liaison between the developers and the customers, you have a lot of opportunities to get insights into where the customers are at and what they’re thinking of going to. Are you seeing a trend toward moving more toward the cloud, or keeping on-premise and bringing in cloud, or a lot of companies just saying we’re not ready for cloud yet, we’re staying with on-premise, can you kind of let me know what trends you’re seeing if you are seeing any trends?

Scott: Yeah, we’re definitely seeing trends, I think our existing customer base, a lot of them that have been running our on-premise solution for years, they’re looking to extend that with the cloud, and some of the agility and flexibility that that provides with cloud, leveraging what they’ve done. So they’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money and effort to set up the processes and the foundation, just like they did with our ERP application. So between ERP and the CRM core on-premise, those foundations are there, but now they want the state-of-the-art user interface, the flexibility to have the same application on their browser and their mobile phones, or mobile iPads, so they’re extending that out to the cloud.

Newer customers coming to SAP, they’re looking right to go to the cloud, because with the market trends of the cloud, they understand the benefits, the cost-benefits of having more of a subscription, public-cloud- type-environment. So it’s different trends, you know, we have companies right now that run in the hybrid because, you know, we have companies that are tracking patient information, right, so they want to keep a lot of that on-premise, they don’t want to put that in a public cloud. But they have divisions that need something simple and basic and traditional CRM, where they want that in the cloud. So they want to run both. We’ve got companies in all different types of industries where cloud can’t be the only solution, cause of regulation, or just the complexity, you know, that our, some of our customers, where they need to really reach in the ERP, and it’s, they’re driving all finance, and orders, fulfillment, and basically CRM is just front-ending those particular processes.

So it was a mixture between both, both type of organizations. And even tomorrow on the panel, one of the customers we’re going to have on there, is going to talk about how they’re going from an on-premise and they’re migrating over to the cloud. And keeping that in a hybrid-type of approach. So we got a lot of different mixture organizations there, not just from an [SMA? SofA? 6:52] perspective, which are generally, our sales, is cloud for sales is where we see the most right now, in traction. But then we also have companies that are, you know, doing our cloud for service for social media, cause they want to have, you know, they want a community-type forum to be able to respond to Twitter and Facebook-type areas, and they want that in a cloud so they can be flexible to move things around and adapt, so we’re seeing a lot of that flexibility, but then we also have a company that, you know they, a subway company, that’s doing precision marketing, where they’re able to give a mobile device to their customers, and a loyalty program, and then based on where that customer is getting off of the subway, they can basically send offers, predictive or one-to-one type offers. So based on their GPS, I can say hey, you just got off this train, and you’re walking by a retail store, boom. I’m going to actually give you a coupon.

Right, so those are the type of things that we see more in the on-premise , because the technology and how do we analyze and the predictiveness, so there’s a need for both, right there in the marketplace, but the market is really pushing a lot of us to the cloud because of, like I said, the flexibility, the agility, and really it’s not about a user interface, originally I think people looked at SAP and said, well, we want to go with your cloud cause it looks prettier, but now what we’re doing with things like Fiori on top of CRM and the SAP Business suite, all the user interfaces are going to look state-of-the-art user interface, and now it comes down to time-to-value, and IT independence, and how much more control can I give to the business users versus IT, so the business can have control and change things around as they see fit, cause that’s one of the big challenges I think, is CRM in general, and I’ve been doing it for more years than I’d like to admit, is you get projects and you implement it on-premise and six months later you have this list of requirements that you want to do and it’s going back and forth and then an upgrade comes, and it takes a while to do an upgrade, and you never get caught up with an on-premise.

Now customers can, basically they’re outsourcing it to SAP, so now we do the upgrade, we maintain all of it, so a lot less work that needs to be done on our customer side, they can focus on how to take that and differentiate their company, versus maintaining upgrades and servers and all that type of technology. So we have about 250 customers now running our cloud for customer solution on top of the 4,000 live customers we have of our CRM on-premise. So I think what you’ll see is a lot of a mixture of those two solutions, where hopefully we won’t be talking about on-premise and cloud, it’ll be SAP customer engagement solutions versus us getting in that you know, is it on-prem, is it cloud…because right now we could even take our on-premise and put it in a private cloud. So we could do cloud both, both ways, so it’s what is the best thing for the customer, to make sure they’re taking advantage of the new innovations. That’s what’s exciting about my job, with a release every three months, there’s always something to talk about.

Lauren: Yeah, well I’ll have to sit down again in three months.

Scott: Absolutely.

Lauren: Well thank you so much, good luck in your session tomorrow, is that the panel?

Scott: Yes, tomorrow we have a session on the panel, and then in the afternoon doing a session on ease of configuring the solutions.

Lauren: Wow, you’re busy this week.

Scott: So it’s going to be a busy week but a fun week.

Lauren: OK great, well thank you very much for sitting down with me Scott, I appreciate it.